Adam's zsh page

zsh is a great UNIX shell. It
has all the benefits of other standard shells, and a hell of a lot
more on top. I'm interested in the interactive features in
particular, because they can save you a lot of time and effort.

OK, here's some of the really cool stuff. A few of the other
shells have some of these features, although in general zsh does it
more comprehensively.

A mind-bogglingly powerful new completion
system, complete with out of the box completion heuristics
for many standard UNIX commands. Very
little effort is required to utilise this system, which can
save hours of typing in the long run.

Command buffer stack -- halfway through typing a complex command
on a crappy old terminal and suddenly realise you need to do some
other stuff first? Just hit M-q ... your command gets
pushed onto the stack to be automatically popped off next time you
hit enter.

Print text straight into the buffer for immediate editing (print -z)

Inline expansion of variables and history commands

Advanced history handling, included incremental sharing with multiple simultaneous shells

A themeable prompts system full of silly prompts, some pinched
from bashprompt and
improved, others written from scratch. There is a screenshot
available which demonstrates
this system. To use it, simply install zsh 4, and then do the
following at your prompt:

The latest official development release branch, at the time of
writing. These are official intermediate development versions
compiled by Peter Stephenson (pws) from patches selected from zsh-workers and committed to
the HEAD branch in CVS. They are sometimes released once a week,
sometimes less often, and are available
in the development subdirectory of your local mirror
site; see www.zsh.org to find
out which mirror site is nearest to you.)